Helping employees meet S.M.A.R.T. goals

S.M.A.R.T. goals help to put your employees and agency on a trajectory for success, but you can’t set them and forget them. Utilize them to their full potential to help employees keep their achievements on track and get the recognition they deserve for their hard work.

Create a plan of action

By pairing a plan of action with the S.M.A.R.T. goal you help your employee to identify actionable steps to be successful.

S.M.A.R.T. goal: Armand is an attorney that will reduce average time spent on contract management by 10% by the end of the year.

You and Armand determine that it took him an average of 30 days to complete his portion of necessary tasks per contract he helped manage in the previous year. To reduce that time by 3 days, he might:

• Examine his contract work for inefficiencies by the end of the first quarter.
• Start creating or clean up a library of common language and clauses by the end of the second quarter.
• Create or improve a template for common contracts by the end of the second quarter.

These tasks could also be collaborative with other employees that have related goals.

Set milestones

When your employee has an idea of where they should be with their goals at different points throughout the year, they can better adjust their approach if they’re falling behind.

S.M.A.R.T. goal: Josh is a data management specialist with a goal of transferring at least 80% of his department’s historic files on a specific topic to digital by the end of the year.

To create a milestone, Josh will need to know how many files he’s working with and can then determine how many he needs to have completed by the midpoint of the year to be on track for his goal. If he’s not on track, you can adjust his goal, look into ways to improve the process or even bring in another team member to contribute to the goal.

Ask yourself if the goal is realistic

Is the goal that you’ve set reasonable for the employee to complete in the given time period and do they have enough control to influence the outcome? If not, take a step back and see what processes are supporting the overall goal.

S.M.A.R.T. goal: Tonya is a health and safety supervisor with the goal of reducing injury rates by 10%.

Tonya may be struggling to meet this goal because she doesn’t have enough control over the outcome. It could help to shift the goal to increasing rates of wearing personal protective equipment or increasing the number of safety audits that hit a minimum compliance score. These goals that give her better control will help keep her motivated and on track.